The Daejeon Biennale is the Daejeon Museum of Art's biennial of art, science and media — inaugurated in 2000 under the title Daejeon FAST, programmed thereafter as Project Daejeon, and from 2018 onward as the Daejeon Art and Science Biennale. Across twenty-five years and ten-plus editions it has held to a constituting subject — the convergence of contemporary art with science, technology and the media-arts field — that no other continuing Korean biennial has programmed at sustained institutional weight from outside the Seoul axis.
A note on identification. Korean media-art biennial programming sits across several institutions: the Seoul Mediacity Biennale (SeMA, 2000–) at the Seoul Museum of Art covers the dedicated media-art register; the Gwangju Biennale (1995–) is the principal contemporary-art platform; the Gwangju Media Art Festival, launched 2012 under the city's UNESCO Creative City of Media Arts designation, operates as an annual festival rather than a biennial; and the Daejeon Biennale at the Daejeon Museum of Art is the continuing Korean biennial whose constituting subject is the convergence of contemporary art with science and media. This editorial is on the Daejeon Biennale.
The Daejeon Biennale is the Daejeon Museum of Art's biennial of art, science and media. It was inaugurated in 2000 under the title Daejeon FAST — at the same millennium-cycle moment, in fact, that the Seoul Metropolitan Government launched its parallel Media_City Seoul biennial — and was subsequently programmed under the title Project Daejeon. Across the 2012, 2014 and 2016 editions, programmed under the respective themes Energy, Brain and Cosmos, the institution sustained its constituting subject and held its biennial cycle. From 2018 onward, the programme has been formally titled the Daejeon Art and Science Biennale.
The most recent edition, Magnum Opus, ran at the Daejeon Museum of Art from 25 October 2024 through 2 February 2025. The title borrowed an alchemical formulation — the magnum opus as the alchemist's great work, the project of material and spiritual transmutation — and the curatorial argument extended that figure into a meditation on the contemporary scientific-artistic project. Among the participating artists were the British glass-and-sculpture practitioner Katharine Dowson, whose site-specific glass installation River of Life was presented at DMA; the British speculative-design artist Agatha Haines; and the Korean practitioners Kim Su Yeon and Lee Jae Seok. The exhibition was curated and organised in-house by the DMA curatorial team — a structural feature, distinguishing the Daejeon Biennale from its peers, to which we will return.
The institutional inheritance — Daedeok Innopolis
What distinguishes the Daejeon Biennale, structurally, from any other continuing Korean biennial is the city in which it is programmed. Daejeon — Korea's fifth-largest metropolitan city, in the country's central region — is the seat of Daedeok Innopolis, the science-research cluster established in 1973 under the developmentalist programme of the early Park Chung-hee state and now containing more than thirty national research institutes and the principal campus of the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST). The institutional consequence is that Daejeon is the Korean city in which a continuing biennial of art and science can be programmed not as metaphor but as a continuing material collaboration — across the museum's exhibition cycles, with the working scientific institutes within walking distance of the museum.
The 2018 edition, BIO, was the first to formalise that institutional collaboration at full programmatic weight. Twenty-or-so artist-teams from ten countries presented forty-eight works across four sub-themed exhibitions — Bio Media, Digital Biology, Desire for Athanasia and Humans in the Anthropocene — across the Daejeon Museum of Art, the DMA Creative Center, the KAIST Vision Hall, the Korea Research Institute of Chemical Technology (KRICT) Space C# and the Institute for Basic Science (IBS) Science Culture Center. The American artist Suzanne Anker presented installation work; the wider participating roster drew from the US, Taiwan, Canada, Australia and Korea. The 2018 edition's argument was that an art-and-science biennial is most usefully programmed not at the level of metaphorical reference but at the level of working institutional collaboration with the scientific bodies whose contemporary practice the art-side of the biennial undertakes to engage.
The 2020 edition — AI
The 2020 Daejeon Biennale, A.I.: Sunshine Misses Windows, was programmed under the director SUN Seunghye and addressed the question of artificial intelligence at a moment — programmed mid-pandemic, autumn 2020 — when the broader cultural and scientific conversation around machine learning had moved decisively into the contemporary mainstream. The exhibition presented work by Hito Steyerl, Mario Klingemann, Quayola, Zach Blas, Jonas Lund, Albert Barqué-Duran and Theresa Reimann-Dubbers, among others, and was co-presented in collaboration with Ars Electronica's In Kepler's Gardens distributed festival, which programmed Daejeon as one of its principal satellite locations. The curatorial team — KIM Juweon as Chief Curator, with KIM Minki, HONG Yeseul, LEE Bo Bae and Alice WOO as curators — was in-house at DMA. The 2020 edition's curatorial register was, by international consensus, among the strongest of any 2020 Asian biennial cycle.
The 2022 edition, Future City, continued the institution's biennial cycle through the late-pandemic moment. Twenty-three participating artists from Finland, Canada, Italy, the Netherlands, France, Japan and Korea presented installation, media, painting and sculpture, organised across four sub-themed exhibitions — Terrapolis for All, Once the Future, Infinite Intersection and City Project — and a parallel science-and-art dialogue series, Future City: Digital Fantasy. The 2024 edition, Magnum Opus, returned the institution to the alchemical and the speculative-scientific.
